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      Review: Live Theater Returns, With Mike Daisey and His Beefs

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      The monologuist appeared onstage, indoors, in front of a real audience, on the first day possible. Maybe he shouldn’t have rushed.Mike Daisey has been a monologuist for more than 20 years. Not continuously — though it has sometimes felt like it.So his disappearance from the stage during quarantine was an especially vivid marker of the pandemic’s devastating effect on live theater. Likewise, his re-emergence in a new show, which popped up on Friday night like a bud in early spring, signifies the beginning of a long-hoped-for renewal.But what will that renewal be like?On the evidence of the 90-minute monologue Daisey performed in front of an actual audience at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, it will be — at least at first — a hasty and hazy affair with redeeming glints of brilliance.The haste is to be expected: Daisey was eager to be the first actor back onstage on the first day permitted by new state regulations. That was Friday, when plays, concerts and other performances were allowed to resume at reduced capacity, with the audience masked and distanced. At the 99-seat Kraine, that meant a sellout crowd of 22; to accommodate others — in all, 565 tickets were sold — the show, produced by Daisey and Frigid New York, was also livestreamed.That’s how I saw it; for additional safety, the Kraine requires all in-person audience members to show proof of vaccination, and I have not yet been jabbed. (One unvaccinated couple was turned away.) But even watching remotely, I was tickled by the familiar old sounds of people settling into their seats, and the sight of their heads silhouetted against the blue light of a stage awaiting action.The show quickly dispelled those good feelings. Daisey has never been what you’d call a feel-good performer; he usually has a beef, and it’s often overcooked. In “21 Dog Years,” his breakthrough, the beef was with Amazon, where he’d once worked. In “How Theater Failed America,” it was the corporatization of entertainment that, he argued, had ruined theater as a building block of community. And in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” it was, somewhat infamously, the Chinese supply chain that feeds our iPhone addiction.Daisey’s new show lacks the invigorating animus supplied by such adversaries. If it has a beef, it is with the pandemic itself: a foe of little inherent dramatic interest. (A virus is no Iago.) At the same time, the pandemic is still too present to be fully fathomed, as Daisey’s title admits with a shrug: “What the Fuck Just Happened?”Daisey’s performance was among the first live indoor shows allowed under new state regulations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt doesn’t help that after an amusing public-address introduction — “The management regrets to inform you that the role of Mike Daisey will be played by Mike Daisey” — he begins, sitting as usual at a simple table with a glass of water and a pad of notes, by telling a seemingly sitcom tale about a bedbug infestation that he and his girlfriend endured in late 2019. Getting rid of the insects involved hiring a company to heat his apartment to 180 degrees for five hours.The bedbug gambit is ironic; Daisey uses it to suggest how unprepared he and everyone else were for the worse disruptions that would come in 2020. Unfortunately, the “worse” is not fleshed out except in trivial ways that have the effect of deflating yet centering Daisey himself. The apartment in which he and his girlfriend are stuck “in captivity” is so small, he tells us, that he must work on the deck, sometimes in the rain. They have to learn to plan and make their own meals, something people move to New York specifically not to do.Small talk has rarely seemed smaller. And even as the story grows to include Daisey’s delivering food in the spring, cheering the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer and phone banking for the November election — all admirable — he somehow winds up the star in each case. His self-deprecation is only a kind of chamois, polishing his brass.For a monologuist, that’s a professional hazard. (He calls his calling “an exercise in mansplaining.”) But in previous works, Daisey has managed to use himself as a lens; here he is more of a mirror, reflecting his own obsessions, disappointments and, it has to be said, thin skin. Apparently, he is an underappreciated giant in a world of straw men.In this self-promoting mode, I find him no more (or less) interesting than an old college chum who corners you at a party and doesn’t notice your eyes glazing over. In his social-critic mode — sniping at obvious targets like Donald J. Trump, whom he has pilloried elsewhere — I find him unexceptional; is it so revealing to refer to the ex-president’s last day in office as “Garbage Day”? As he feels his way through the sweaty dark toward a theme that just isn’t there, you begin to wonder whether his apartment ever cooled off.But in his oracular mode, which though built on the bedbug story at the start doesn’t arrive until the end, he is outstanding. Connecting Covid-19 not only to ecological disaster but also to the pandemic of racism, he finally aims at antagonists worthy of his rhetorical big guns.In language that is burnished and implacable — and, it seemed to me, less improvised but more alive than the rest of the show — he says that though the “plague was not a gift” it was an opportunity, a “dress rehearsal.” Noting that there’s “no vaccine for fascism,” he calls for a “refining fire” that will burn out the hate in our system.These were startling and stirring words, the kind that hogtie your attention. They are worth having Daisey, and live theater, back for. Perhaps by the time he repeats the show, on May 9, there will be less of him and more of them.What the Fuck Just Happened?Repeated on May 9 at the Kraine Theater, Manhattan; frigid.nyc. More

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      Arthur Kopit, Whose ‘Oh Dad’ Shook Up the Theater, Dies at 83

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      A three-time Tony nominee, he first became known for avant-garde works, many of them christened with rambling titles, that sparked spirited reactions.Arthur Kopit, the avant-garde playwright who thrust Off Broadway into a new era with the absurdist satirical farce “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” and earned Tony Award nominations for two wildly different plays, “Indians” and “Wings,” and the musical “Nine,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.His death was announced by a spokesman, Rick Miramontez, who did not specify the cause.In 1962, when “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” opened at the 300-seat Phoenix Theater on East 74th Street, American popular culture was shifting. Julie Andrews was between the idealistic “Camelot” and the wholesome “Mary Poppins”; Lenny Bruce, the hot comic of the moment, was known for what came to be called “sick humor.” Broadway was dominated by “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Man for All Seasons.”Along came a 24-year-old playwright with a script about an older woman who liked traveling with her virginal adult son and her husband’s preserved corpse. The New York Times critic, Howard Taubman, had reservations — he called it “funny” and “stageworthy” but “nonsensical” — but it won the Drama Desk Award (then the Vernon Rice Award) and even transferred to Broadway for a few months in 1963.There was often vehement disagreement about Mr. Kopit’s work. Before “Indians” (1969) — a dreamlike production that positioned Buffalo Bill Cody as the first guilty white American liberal and prominently featured his 19th-century Wild West show — arrived on Broadway, there was a production in London, where critical reaction was decidedly mixed. The script included the rape of one Native American and the casual murder (for sport) of another.Clive Barnes, writing in The Times, called the Broadway production, starring Stacy Keach, “a gentle triumph” and praised Mr. Kopit for “trying to do something virtually no one has done before: the multilinear epic.” But Walter Kerr, his Times colleague, compared it to “bad burlesque.”John Lahr, writing in The Village Voice, summarized “Indians” as “never less than scintillating” and called it the “most probing and the most totally theatrical Broadway play of this decade.” “Indians” received three Tony nominations, including for best play.Mr. Kopit professed a very specific social conscience. “I’m not concerned in the play with the terrible plight of the Indians now — they were finished from the moment the first white man arrived,” he told a London newspaper in 1968. “What I want to show is a series of confrontations between two alien systems.” Many saw parallels to the Vietnam War, then at its peak.When Mr. Kopit returned to Broadway a decade later, his subject could not have been more different. “Wings,” which opened at the Public Theater in 1978 and moved to Broadway the next year, followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman (played by Constance Cummings) having a stroke and reacting to it with fear, determination and kaleidoscopic verbal confusion. As The Washington Post reported, when the main character is asked to repeat the sentence “We live across the street from the school,” she replies, “Malacats on the forturay are the kesterfacts of the romancers.”Mr. Kopit in 1999. “When I wrote a play,” he once said, “I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said.”Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesRichard Eder of The Times called “Wings,” which had been inspired by the post-stroke rehabilitation experiences of Mr. Kopit’s stepfather, “a brilliant work” — “complex at first glance,” he wrote, “yet utterly lucid, written with great sensitivity and with the excitement of a voyage of discovery.”The play was nominated for three Tonys. Ms. Cummings won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best actress and an Obie for her performance.Mr. Kopit discovered his gift for writing plays almost by accident. In a 2007 interview with The Harvard Gazette, the official news outlet of his alma mater, he looked back at his initial reaction when he switched from short stories to scripts. “I was having a lot of trouble with the narrative point of view,” he recalled. “When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said. I wasn’t anywhere in the play, and I liked that.”Arthur Lee Koenig was born on May 10, 1937, in Manhattan, the son of Henry Koenig, an advertising salesman, and Maxine (Dubin) Koenig. His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as millinery model. He took on his stepfather’s name after his mother married George Kopit, a jewelry sales executive.Arthur grew up and attended high school in Lawrence, an affluent Long Island community. He was already writing by the time he left Harvard in 1959 with an engineering degree. As he began a graduate fellowship in Europe, he heard about a Harvard playwriting contest. He wrote, entered and won the $250 prize with “Oh Dad,” which he said he never believed had any commercial potential.Mr. Kopit was at first fond of wordy, rambling titles. “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” even had a subtitle: “A Pseudo-Classical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition.” He followed that success with a collection of one-acts, including “The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis,” set at a suburban country club. “On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next” was another early work.His last Tony nomination was for the book of the musical “Nine” (1982), based on Federico Fellini’s film “8½.” That same year, he adapted the book of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” for a Broadway revival. More

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      What Makes ‘Follies’ a Classic? 7 Answers and 1 Big Problem.

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      Fifty years ago, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman exploded the Broadway “concept” musical by conjuring the bittersweet reunion of aging showgirls.It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely: a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment — yet survived.Not only is “Follies,” which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50 years later, trailing a string of revivals, revisals and gala concerts, but it is also now recognized as the high-water mark of the serious “concept” musical, that genre in which form and function are brought into the tightest possible alignment. The score, by Stephen Sondheim, is a marvel and a minefield of layered meanings. The sets make comments. And in the original staging, by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, even frivolity had to serve a purpose.Not that there was much frivolity in James Goldman’s script; the gun disappeared but the two couples were still floridly dysfunctional. Both wives had been showgirls in the Weismann (think Ziegfeld) Follies at the end of its run of annual extravaganzas in the years between the World Wars. Both had been in love with Ben, a Stage Door Johnny with big ambitions. But Phyllis was smart enough to nab him; they are now wealthy, unhappy sophisticates. Sally — romantic, conventional — got Ben’s feckless pal Buddy; never for one moment in the 30 ensuing years has she been happy with the trade-off.Ghostly showgirls wander through the ruins of a theater in the 2017 London revival.Johan PerssonDuring a Follies reunion at the decrepit Weismann Theater, on the night before it will be razed to make room for a parking lot, the two couples meet up and promptly disintegrate. As they do, their past selves appear alongside them as living characters. At the same time, former stars of the Follies relive memories and stumble through old numbers, magically ventriloquized from Broadway’s past in the Sondheim songs.As the ghosts crowd in, the couples’ tangled history is unearthed, bringing them to the point of a group nervous breakdown in the form of a 30-minute mini-“Follies” of their own. To see them collapse, dissolving into a fantasy world accompanied by a Golden Age score, is to see American optimism collapse along with them.But its big canvas is not the only reason “Follies” remains important. (See seven more reasons, and a caveat, below.) In its seriousness and cleverness, in its matching of style to substance, in its use of a medium to comment on itself, it has hardly ever been bettered. In any case, ambitious musical theater would never be the same; we would not have “Fun Home” or “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” without “Follies” hovering behind them, the most beautiful ghost of all.1. A requiem for nostalgiaThe ensemble of older actors with their younger counterparts hovering above in the 2001 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “Follies” is about two lousy marriages. Mucking around among their mind games and betrayals, it more readily recalls midcentury drama than anything in the musical canon. (Imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by Busby Berkeley.) But it’s also about the lousy marriage of American ideals and American reality, a union of near opposites polished and preserved by the shellac of nostalgia.The brilliant concept was to use the two stories to inform each other, letting the Faulknerian past that is “not even past” intrude upon the present. So Sally’s ghost makes love to Ben while his makes love to her; later, she sings a torch song that sounds as if it’s from 1941. The reunion, if it reunifies one couple, destroys another. Even the songs we love are dangerous. That paradox is crystallized in “One More Kiss,” warbled by an ancient Viennese soprano while her younger self casually tosses off its coloratura. “Never look back,” the lyric warns. “Follies” is what happens if you do.2. In praise of older womenThe ghosts of Follies past that live in the theater had to be both ethereal and imposing. Casting was done among Las Vegas showgirls who were already six feet tall before their enormous headdresses turned them into giants. Even so, a Who Was Who of middle-aged and older women stole the show: Dorothy Collins, 44; Mary McCarty, 47; Yvonne De Carlo, 48; Alexis Smith, 49; Fifi D’Orsay, 66; and Ethel Shutta, 74, among them. Though cast for the kick of nostalgia their names elicited, they made survival itself seem vital and sexy, as Smith’s high-stepping Time magazine cover demonstrated.3. Copies that improved on the originalsBernadette Peters performing the now-standard “Losing My Mind” in the 2011 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of the performative songs in “Follies” — the ones sung as if they were real numbers from the past — are pastiches, sampling Harold Arlen (“I’m Still Here”), George Gershwin (“Losing My Mind”), Irving Berlin (“Beautiful Girls”), Sigmund Romberg (“One More Kiss”) and many others. With this catch: In almost every case, they are better crafted and richer than their templates. Which makes their salute to the past a wonderfully complicated, and sometimes cruel, gesture.4. A number for the agesTerri White, center, as Stella Deems leading “Who’s That Woman” in 2011 with (from left) Elaine Paige, Florence Lacey, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Jan Maxwell, Peters and Susan Watson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStella Deems, an old-school belter, had a specialty “mirror” number in the Follies. Now, at the reunion, she and six alumnae of the chorus line, including Phyllis and Sally, try to perform it, even though the dance (as one of them puts it) “winded me when I was 19.” Soon you see why, as the choreography, which at first involves simple poses and mirroring gestures, turns into an exhausting tap extravaganza, courtesy of Bennett. But the mindblower comes halfway through, when strange shards of spinning light emerge from the dark behind the panting, middle-aged women. These are the ghosts of their former selves: glamazons in mirror-encrusted costumes performing the number tirelessly and perfectly.By the time the real and the remembered choruses merge in a thrilling finale, the idea of mirroring has taken on a larger meaning. “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!” Stella sings in wonder and horror at the person she sees in her looking glass. “That woman is me!”5. ‘I’m Still Here’De Carlo — a movie star of the ’40s and ’50s but Lily Munster to everyone thereafter — had the biggest name in the cast yet one of the smallest roles. She needed a showstopper; the one Sondheim originally wrote wasn’t working. During tryouts in Boston, he replaced it with “I’m Still Here,” a five-minute number that catalogs with tart good spirits a showbiz life (based on Joan Crawford’s) in which you “career from career to career.” It could not have been staged more simply: De Carlo basically just stood downstage and let it rip. Still, it was (and remains, in the many interpretations since) a knockout, driving home the point that long-term professional survival, and maybe emotional survival as well, is often a matter of inoculating oneself with failure.6. The fabulousnessAt $800,000, “Follies” was a very expensive show for its time, but you saw where the money went. Boris Aronson’s set, which exploded into lace and froufrou for the final sequence, was technically complex; Florence Klotz’s costumes were among the most sumptuous seen on a Broadway stage since Ziegfeld himself. And with all the major roles doubled by “ghosts,” the cast was huge: 47 performers, not including understudies and standbys.“Nearly everything that could cause a Broadway musical to go over budget did,” says Ted Chapin, now the president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization but then Prince’s apprentice — and the author of “Everything Was Possible,” a memoir of that experience. “If it were produced today, I would imagine it would log in at close to $30 million.” Alas, that’s a sum no one would spend on such a chancy show, which means we’ll never see its like again.7. That posterDavid Edward Byrd designed the poster for the original production.PhotofestIn 1971, the graphic artist David Edward Byrd was best known for his rock posters, including one for the original Woodstock and one for Jimi Hendrix. But he’d started designing for theatrical productions as well, and when an “aesthetic argument” led Prince to ditch one of his Art Deco-inspired sketches, Byrd came up with the now-famous face of “Follies”: an impassive beauty with flowing Technicolor hair and a branching crack from chin to brow. (The face was based on Marlene Dietrich’s, in a photo from “Shanghai Express.”) To Byrd, it represented the end of an era, but it also conveyed, with powerful concision, the crackup of an American fantasy of endless tranquillity. And, not incidentally, made a Broadway show seem as cool as Woodstock.8. Then again …“Follies” is brilliant and “Follies” is a mess. It bowls me over perhaps more than any other musical, yet I have never been fully satisfied with it intellectually. Look beneath the unparalleled packaging — the score, costumes, casting, staging — and you find a lot that doesn’t add up. As Frank Rich noted in his 1971 Harvard Crimson review, it’s “a musical about the death of the musical” — a wonderful paradox but one that undermines the experience. If musicals are dead … is this one too?Sometimes — even when Carlotta sings “I’m Still Here” — the vaunted concept seems a bit opaque. (If it’s about her own life, how could it also be her Follies number?) And don’t look too closely at the main characters, either; spouters of self-conscious dialogue, they are only fully believable when they sing. For that, Goldman usually gets the blame — but if so, he should also get credit for providing the armature for everyone else’s epochal achievement. It may be about the death of musicals, but “Follies” pointed the way to bringing them back to life. More

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      Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

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      With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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      Pat Collins, Tony Award-Winning Lighting Designer, Dies at 88

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      She sought to move audiences with her lighting in shows like “The Threepenny Opera,” “I’m Not Rappaport” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”Pat Collins, a Tony Award-winning lighting designer and a Broadway mainstay whose work was seen for nearly 50 years in plays, musicals and operas, died on March 21 at her home in Branford, Conn. She was 88.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Dr. Virginia Stuermer, her partner of 64 years and her only survivor.Ms. Collins, who won her Tony for Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” in 1986, was the lighting designer for more than 30 other Broadway productions, among them “The Threepenny Opera,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Doubt,” which earned her a Tony nomination.“Her lighting was like her personality: She was nervy and intelligent but with a sensitive side,” John Lee Beatty, a Tony-winning scenic designer and frequent collaborator, said in a phone interview. “She really blossomed in tech rehearsals; she loved to create on the spot.” He added: “She could do conventional lighting, but she also wanted to try everything.”Ms. Collins brought an autumnal palette to “I’m Not Rappaport,” about two irascible and inseparable octogenarians who meet on a Central Park bench, and the darkness of looming death to a 1989 production in Baltimore of “Miss Evers’ Boys,” David Feldshuh’s play about the federal government’s withholding of treatment for syphilis to poor Black men. In a 2002 revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” at the Union Square Theater, she transformed figures onstage into what Ben Brantley of The New York Times called “ambiguous silhouettes.”She also worked at regional theaters throughout the United States and with opera companies in New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, London, Paris and Munich — always using light to establish moods, create the illusion of time passing and indicate where the audience’s attention should be on the stage.“Lighting has everything to do with how you feel and how things affect you,” Ms. Collins told The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y., in 1975. “Almost everyone has had the aesthetic experience of being moved by seeing light filtered through trees in the forest. Multiply that by one thousand and you’d have some idea of the constant subliminal effect lighting has on us.”The musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on Broadway. It was one of more than 30 Broadway productions for which Ms. Collins designed the lighting.Alamy Stock PhotoMichael Chybowski, a lighting designer who worked with Ms. Collins on two productions at the Alaska Repertory Theater in the 1980s, said of her: “She understood the point of the show and made sure that you saw it. Whether it was portentous events in ‘An Enemy of the People’ or the sheer fun of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ her light reflected and communicated that.”Mr. Chybowski recalled the lighting design that Ms. Collins devised for “An Enemy of the People,” Ibsen’s political drama about a scientist who tries to save his town from water pollution but becomes a scapegoat.“She went into the studio, worked at my drafting table for four hours, drew up the plan and went off to the airport,” he said. “I said, ‘It can’t be that easy,’ but we put on the show, and it was the most beautiful show we did in my five years at the theater.”Patricia Jane Collins was born on April 3, 1932, in Brooklyn to Jerry and Alta (Hyatt) Collins. Her mother worked in a law firm; her father left the family when Pat was very young.Ms. Collins attended Pembroke College in Brown University, where she studied Spanish and joined a campus drama group. After graduating, she spent a year at Yale Drama School — where she met Dr. Stuermer — but felt it was a waste of time. She went to work instead as a stage manager at the Joffrey Ballet, and then as an assistant to Jean Rosenthal, a top Broadway lighting designer, at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn.Ms. Collins won a Tony for her work on Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” in 1986. She also designed the lighting for a 2002 Broadway revival with Ben Vereen, left, and Judd Hirsch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMs. Collins worked as a stage manager, among other jobs, in the 1960s but did not hit her stride until Joseph Papp, the founder and director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, hired her to design the lighting for productions of “The Threepenny Opera” at Lincoln Center in 1976, which earned her a Tony nomination, and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1977.“She had fixed somebody else’s show, and he offered her ‘Threepenny,’” said Mimi Jordan Sherin, a lighting designer and longtime associate of Ms. Collins’s. “That put her on the map, and she never stopped working after that.”For all that she worked on Broadway, she spent much of her time away from it, designing lighting at regional theaters, including Ford’s Theater in Washington, Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn.For the Hartford Stage Company’s production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” Malcolm Johnson of The Hartford Courant wrote admiringly of “the ever-changing light patterns” that Ms. Collins had created with “mirror images and stars and moons and comets.”Ms. Collins, who began listening to opera on radio at age 9, designed lighting for productions at the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House in London and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. She also conceived the lighting for Lar Lubovitch’s production of “Othello: A Dance in Three Acts” at the American Ballet Theater in 1997.Ms. Collins conceived the lighting for Lar Lubovitch’s production of “Othello” with the American Ballet Theater in 1997.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesHer other Broadway credits include “The Heidi Chronicles,” “The Sisters Rosenzweig,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Good People,” “Orphans” and “Execution of Justice,” for which she won a Drama Desk Award in 1986.Mr. Beatty recalled being in London one year when Ms. Collins had a double bill of work there — Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and a performance nearby at the English National Opera.At “Into the Woods,” he said, “the curtain goes down, the music starts” and the lighting was “bright and simple, like the world’s biggest flashbulb had come on. Whoa, in your face!”“There was a certain joyfulness to that,” he added. “Then, she was down the street, doing an esoteric opera, challenging that director to think out of the box. It was perfect Pat.” More

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      Theater to Stream: ‘Broadway Backwards’ and Starry Readings

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      Among the offerings are a well-matched double bill, Ute Lemper’s tribute to Marlene Dietrich and a virtual revival of Michel Legrand’s musical “Amour.”Theater audiences have become more like movie fans and television bingers: They can settle in for a double bill. Before the pandemic, they might have scheduled a matinee and evening performance back to back, but there were those pesky hours to kill in between. Now it’s possible to simply queue up a couple of streaming shows and hit play.A natural pairing this month combines two engaging autobiographical shows written by gifted actors looking back on their childhoods. Round House Theater of Bethesda, Md., is presenting Colman Domingo’s “A Boy and His Soul,” which played Off Broadway in 2009. Domingo, who portrayed the bandleader Cutler in the film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” looks back at his connection to music and family while growing up gay in the 1970s and ’80s in Philadelphia. This new production is the first major one in which he himself does not appear, with Ro Boddie taking on the role. Through Apr. 18; roundhousetheatre.orgAcross the Potomac River, in Arlington, Va., Signature Theater is presenting “Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only Child.” Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction, Watts (who played Ike Turner in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” on Broadway) recalls growing up with his single mother in the 1980s and ’90s. The title refers to fruit spread, but sound and music energize the show, with DJ Duggz spinning onstage and acting as Watts’s occasional sidekick. Through May 7; sigtheatre.org‘Broadway Backwards’Along the lines of MCC Theater’s beloved “Miscast,” in which stars perform songs they would never get to sing in real shows, this Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS annual fund-raising series features gender-reversed performances. This year’s concert mixes new numbers — hold on to your hats during the opener with Stephanie J. Block, Deborah Cox and Lea Salonga — with ones from previous editions, featuring the usual array of starry participants. Through April 3; broadwaycares.org‘Inside the GPO’The GPO of this docudrama title refers to the General Post Office in Dublin, which was central to the 1916 Easter Rising of Irish Republicans against British rule. Created as a centennial commemoration, Fishamble’s production takes place at the actual GPO, which in 1916 had been occupied by the rebels for several days. The company is now streaming a remastered digital version in partnership with various Irish organizations around the world, including the New York Irish Center. April 1-5; newyorkirishcenter.org‘What the ___ Just Happened?’The monologuist Mike Daisey returns to the stage in a new piece livestreamed from the Kraine Theater in New York — in front of an in-person, fully vaccinated audience. The title (you can guess which word was omitted) neatly encapsulates many people’s stunned take on the past year. April 2; frigid.nycClockwise, from top left: Debbie Allen, Heather Alicia Simms, Alicia Stith and Phylicia Rashad in “Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous.”via Spotlight on Plays‘Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous’The Spotlight on Plays series has pulled off a fun feat with its latest reading, the first time the sisters Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad have acted together since the PBS movie “The Old Settler” 20 years ago. Rashad plays a grande dame of the stage, and Allen is her friend and director, in this 2019 comedy by Pearl Cleage (“Blues for an Alabama Sky”). April 8-12; broadwaysbestshows.comOne Year of Play-PerViewWhen many theatrical institutions curled up into the equivalent of a fetal position in March 2020, some people got to work. Among them was the enterprising reading series Play-PerView, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a mix of new and old works. In the first category is “Babette in Retreat” by Justin Sayre, who in the past year has been cultivating a high-camp sensibility in a steady stream of comedies like “Drowsenberg,” “When Sunny Went Blue” and “The Ducks.” There should be some choice bon mots and slapstick for Becca Blackwell, Nathan Lee Graham (as the title character), Randy Harrison (“Queer as Folk”), Bradford Louryk and Mary Testa. April 10-14; play-perview.comRandy Harrison, left, and Scott Parkinson in “Cockfight Play.”via Studio Theater‘Cockfight Play’Randy Harrison also takes on the lead role of John in Studio Theater’s fully staged digital production of Mike Bartlett’s “Cockfight Play.” (The actual title is just one word, so use your deductive skills). John is in a relationship with M (Scott Parkinson) when he falls in love with W (Kathryn Tkel). “Love?” a startled M says. “She?” Bartlett’s deceivingly simple premise explores the vagaries of romantic attraction, and the director David Muse makes good use of a split screen to overcome the actors’ need to maintain their distance. Through Apr. 18; studiotheatre.orgThe cast of an online revival of Michel Legrand’s musical “Amour,” presented by Art Lab and ShowTown Productions.via Art Lab‘Amour’Michel Legrand’s only Broadway musical was a flop, running for only 48 performances in 2002 — which is a shame because the poetic, surrealistic “Amour,” in which a civil servant realizes he can walk through walls, has plenty of the gorgeous melodies you’d expect from the French composer. Now, Art Lab and ShowTown Productions are presenting a revival starring Derrick Baskin (a Tony Award nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations”), Drew Gehling (“Waitress”), Kara Lindsay, Adam Pascal, Christiani Pitts and Rachel York. It is high time “Amour” gets some love. April 2-4; stellartickets.com‘Period Piece’Don’t expect costumes of yesteryear. This project, conceived by Susan Cinoman, has enrolled an impressive roster of playwrights — among them, Ngozi Anyanwu, Bekah Brunstetter, Lisa D’Amour, Kirsten Greenidge, Lauren Gunderson, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl and Caridad Svich — to create monologues about periods. The works, directed by Karen Carpenter (“Love, Loss, and What I Wore”), are spread over three evenings, and each has a unique cast; participants include Geneva Carr, Judy Gold, Julie Halston, Jessica Hecht, Mia Katigbak, Beth Leavel, Lauren Patten and Julie White. April 12, 19 and 26; periodpieceplay.com‘Hype Man: a break beat play’This play with music by Idris Goodwin revolves around the relationship between a white M.C. (Michael Knowlton) and his Black hype man (Kadahj Bennett). Their friendship goes from complicated to adversarial as they react differently to a case of police brutality, while their beatmaker (Rachel Cognata) is stuck in the middle. The show ran in New York in 2018, but Company One’s version, presented by the American Repertory Theater, is freshly urgent, considering the past year’s debates around policing and the appropriation of historically Black art forms. April 8-May 8; americanrepertorytheater.orgUte Lemper in “Rendezvous With Marlene.”Russ Rowland‘Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene’One night in 1988, Marlene, as in Marlene Dietrich, phoned her fellow German chanteuse Ute Lemper, then starring in a production of “Cabaret” in Paris. The two women chatted for hours. Three decades later, Lemper wrote and starred in a cabaret tribute that dives into Dietrich’s life and songs. The York Theater, which hosted the show in 2019, is presenting a virtual version that was filmed at the beloved East Village boîte Club Cumming. April 8-10; yorktheatre.org More

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      Casting a ‘Follies’ of the Future, With Beyoncé and Ben Platt

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      In the 50 years since the musical’s debut, revivals and concerts have served its great songs to great stars. Who’d be our Broadway babies 25 years from now?“Follies” is every musical theater nerd’s favorite casting puzzle. It needs names that evoke nostalgia for the showbiz past but also skilled triple-threats who match the characters — and one another. Below, a look at performers who originated the six major roles, and a selection of those who followed over the last 50 years. Plus: Our dream cast for the 2046 revival, when “Follies” will be 75 and the nostalgia will be for today.Benjamin StoneDistinguished. Wealthy. Unfaithful. Depressed.From left: John McMartin, Victor Garber and Benjamin Walker.From left: Associated Press, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times and Richard Perry/The New York TimesOf all the original stars of “Follies,” only John McMartin came without nostalgic baggage. He was a theater actor first — and that’s how Ben, a philanthropist and retired politician, has been cast ever since.For the 2007 Encores! production, the four-time Tony nominee Victor Garber was Ben to Donna Murphy’s Phyllis. The pair looked perfect together, like a president and first lady.For the 75th anniversary revival, Benjamin Walker, who has played Andrew Jackson onstage and Abraham Lincoln (vampire killer) on film, seems just right.Buddy PlummerManic. Sweaty. Unfaithful. Depressed.From left: Gene Nelson, Mandy Patinkin and Ben Platt.Associated Press, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times, Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA former Hollywood hoofer — he played Will Parker in the movie of “Oklahoma!” — Gene Nelson was dead-on casting for the salesman unfortunate enough to be in love with his wife.When the New York Philharmonic produced a concert version for a gala in 1985, Mandy Patinkin took the role — and shook it for all it was worth.Sure, he’s already got his mitts on the “Merrily We Roll Along” movie, but wasn’t “Dear Evan Hansen” a de facto audition for Ben Platt to play this walking nervous breakdown, too?Phyllis Rogers StoneElegant. Icy. Unfaithful. Angry.From left: Alexis Smith, Diana Rigg and Beyoncé.From left: Associated Press, Andrea Mohin/The New York Times and Kevin Winter, via Getty Images for The Recording AcademyBy 1971, Alexis Smith was long retired from Hollywood, where her aloof, glamorous aura made her a star of the 1940s. That persona (and timeline) made her perfect for Phyllis.Who better than Diana Rigg, that former Avenger, to take the role of a brilliantly imperious wife for the 1987 London premiere?Lucy is juicy. Jessie is dressy. Or so Phyllis sings, describing her two contrasting halves. Beyoncé is all that, and more. Case closed.Sally Durant PlummerFrilly. Romantic. Faithful. Nuts.From left: Dorothy Collins, Bernadette Peters and Ruthie Ann Miles.From left: Associated Press, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times and Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the 1950s, Dorothy Collins was a lovely B-list songbird on “Your Hit Parade.” In 1971, she still had the voice — and despite a big smile, the acting chops to make Sally dark.Bernadette Peters took the role in the 2011 Broadway revival, stripping away Sally’s social skin and turning darkness into madness.Ruthie Ann Miles won a Tony Award for her impassioned rendition of “Something Wonderful” in “The King and I.” Sally’s “Losing My Mind” is another ode to longing worthy of her heart-melting voice.Hattie WalkerIndomitable. Leather-Lunged. Ancient. Ageless.From left: Ethel Shutta, Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters.From left: Martha Swope, via The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times and Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe former radio star Ethel Shutta was 74 when she originated the role — and debuted its great song “Broadway Baby”; her own Broadway debut was in 1922.For the 1985 concert, no one was going to get between Hattie and Elaine Stritch, who sang “Broadway Baby” for most of the next 30 years.In 2046, Bernadette Peters will be 98 — and look 48. Having already played Sally in the 2011 revival, she’ll be perfect for a role she has never played except in real life.Carlotta CampionBruised. Tough. Hilarious. Still Here.From left: Yvonne De Carlo, Carol Burnett and Justin Vivian Bond.From left: Associated Press, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times, Deidre Schoo for The New York TimesYvonne De Carlo, the best known member of the original cast, portrayed the former B-list star who sings “I’m Still Here.”For the same 1985 concert, Carol Burnett — a bigger star than any of the “Follies” characters — was a curveball Carlotta. But no one could sell the setup for her big number better: “It was supposed to be a sad song, but it kept getting laughs.”How much Carlotta was there in Kiki DuRayne of “Kiki & Herb” fame? More than a splash. In 2046 it’ll be time for her creator, the cabaret chanteuse Justin Vivian Bond, to drink up, close the bar — and bring down the house. More

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      ‘Follies’ Was My First Broadway Show. 50 Years Later, I Remember It All.

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      On a thrilling trip to New York, a 16-year-old budding critic learned that the insistent optimism of musical theater was a beautiful lie.At long last, I was exactly where I had yearned to be for most of my young life. I had arrived in the holy land, which for me was a show palace in New York City, the world capital of my childhood fantasies. My very first Broadway musical, a form of entertainment I regarded as a religion, was about to begin.Then the lights went down in the cavernous Winter Garden Theater. It got dark, which I had expected. It stayed dark, which I hadn’t. The stage was flooded in shadow, and you had to squint to make out the people on it. Some were tall, spectral beauties from another era in glittering headdresses, and others were as ordinary as my parents, dressed up for a night out. None of them looked happy.The grand orchestral music seemed to be eroding as I listened, like some magnificent sand castle dissolving in the tide, as sweet notes slid into sourness. This was definitely not “Hello, Dolly!” or “Bye Bye Birdie” or “Funny Girl,” whose sunny, exclamation-pointed melodies I knew by heart from the original cast recordings.I didn’t know what had hit me. I certainly didn’t know that it would keep hitting me, in sharp and unexpected fragments of recollection, for the next 50 years.It was the spring of 1971. The show was“Follies,” a title that turned out to refer to both bygone Ziegfeld-style spectacles and the delusions of its main characters. It had a score by a rising composer named Stephen Sondheim and was directed by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, names that didn’t mean much to me then. The cast included Yvonne De Carlo, Gene Nelson and the divine Alexis Smith, whom I knew from old movies on television.A ghostly showgirl in the original production of “Follies.”Martha Swope, Billy Rose Theatre Division/The New York Public LibrarySince the show was still in previews, there had been no reviews to cue my expectations. And word of mouth hadn’t reached Winston-Salem, N.C., where I was a 16-year-old public high school student.My parents had finally succumbed to my pleas to be taken to Manhattan, where my older sister lived. We were all side-by-side in orchestra seats, and I could feel my mom and dad basking in my excitement.That excitement was tinged with a thrill of illicit betrayal. Yes, “Follies” was undeniably a big Broadway musical, staged with an opulence that would be unthinkable today. But this tale of two unhappy couples, stalked by the ghosts of their younger selves during a showbiz reunion in the ruins of a once stately theater, was telling me that the optimistic promises of the musical comedies I had been weaned on were lies.In a cover story that came out a month later — its pictures would adorn my bedroom walls, along with posters of Humphrey Bogart and Vanessa Redgrave, until I left for college — Time magazine enthusiastically (and accurately) described “Follies” as anti-nostalgic, a modern corrective to the cheery, escapist camp of hit revivals like “No, No Nanette.”Time’s assessment was the opposite of that of the New York Times critics Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr, who didn’t like “Follies” at all. The plot, they wrote, was hackneyed and formulaic. As for the songs, with their homages to styles of showbiz past, Barnes called them a “non-hit parade of pastiche.”I couldn’t disagree about James Goldman’s book, which felt like a rehash of the best sellers about middle-aged disenchantment I borrowed from my parents. (I already suspected that my future was in criticism.) But the songs stuck with me, along with piercing images of aging performers clinging to a waning spotlight. And I had a vague sense that I would be destined to forever recall this odd and majestic show “like a movie in my head that plays and plays,” to borrow from its script.In some ways, “Follies” was a perfect match to my adolescent self. My parents had always encouraged me to understand that old people hadn’t always been old, to look for the layers of what they had been. (I was fascinated by the culture of my grandparents’ generation, which meant that references to Brenda Frazier and “Abie’s Irish Rose” didn’t go over my head.)And part of what I found so affecting about musicals were the differences between their exalted forms and the often ordinary lives they portrayed. (I would restage classic musicals in my head with my friends and family in the leading roles; it made me cry happily.)What I didn’t get then — and couldn’t have as a teenager — was how the music was the very sound of memory. It was the cleverness of Sondheim’s lyrics that attracted me in my youth. I loved quoting their sophisticated rhymes.But the older I got, and the more I listened, the more I appreciated the complexity of the pastiche songs, like “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” “Broadway Baby” and the torchy “Losing My Mind” (which I confess to having sung, drunk, in a piano bar). These aren’t just facile imitations from another era; they’re inflected with the echoes and distortions of all the years that have passed since. As a memory musical, I came to realize, “Follies” approaches Proustian dimensions.When I hear anything from “Follies” now — or see a new production (I’ve written about seven incarnations for The New York Times) — it’s with the memory of watching that first cast of characters remembering. Every time what I’m listening to sounds deeper and richer, and sadder and funnier. And I recall, with a tightening of my chest, that 16-year-old boy staring at the stage in rapture and bewilderment. More